Robert Vaughn won an Emmy for playing Frank Flaherty. In his acceptance speech, he thanked Director Gary Nelson for directing twelve and a half hours of television "by himself".
Despite winning an Emmy for his performance, Robert Vaughn doesn't mention the series at all in his autobiography A Fortunate Life.
This TV mini-series greatly expands on John Ehrlichman's novel, which is chiefly the source for the first and final segments. The plot of the book was a fictionalized account of Richard M. Nixon's years in the White House, and many more incidents from those years are added to the plot in a fictionalized form.
The character of "President Richard Monckton" is transparently drawn from that of the real-life president Richard Nixon, whilst "Dr. Carl Tessler", the academic who becomes a senior presidential adviser is clearly meant remind viewers of Dr. Kissinger and "Elmer Morse", the veteran chief of the FBI, is a clear portrait of J. Edgar Hoover, whom the actor Thayer David closely resembled.